REVIEWS:
ASSORTED by Jeremy Agar
Peace Researcher 33 –
November 2006
“9/11 IN PLANE SIGHT”,
A Documentary (DVD) By William Lewis. Power Hour
Production, 2004.
“LET’S ROLL 9/11”,
A Documentary (DVD) By Dylan Avery. Loose Change,
2006.
“THE BUSH AGENDA:
Invading The World, One Economy At A Time”
Antonia
Juhasz. Duckworth, London, 2006.
“OVERTHROW:
America’s Century Of
Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq”
Stephen Kinzer. Times Books, New
York, 2006.
“FUTURE: TENSE.
The Coming World Order”
Gwynne Dyer.
Scribe, Melbourne, 2006.
A couple of years ago, Robin Cook, a
former UK foreign
affairs minister, suffered a fatal heart attack when tramping in Scotland.
Cook was comparatively young and fit. But isn’t that the way it goes? Cook’s
death made the news because he was admired by some for the scepticism about
Tony Blair’s Iraq
policy that had got him sacked, but we hear now that a better explanation is
making the rounds in the Middle East. Cook was bumped
off. Of course. Aren’t they all? He can join President Kennedy, Princess Di and
the rest, the ones Who Knew Too Much or were Too Good.
Kennedy and Di had powerful friends
and enemies, so all sorts of motives can be invented for their demise. We can
place sinister interests on the grassy knoll* in Dallas
or in the Paris tunnel. For
conspiracy buffs it’s an entertainment, an aspect of celebrity worship. Was it
the Mafia or Castro who had Kennedy killed? Who got Princess Di’s chauffeur
drunk? Will Hollywood stars Brad Pitt and Jennifer
Anniston make up? * The grassy knoll in Dallas
was supposedly the site of the “real” assassin(s) of President Kennedy in 1963.
The Paris tunnel was where Princess
Diana died in the 1997 car crash. Ed.
The more his musings confound common
sense, the more the conspiracy theorist is validated. His wisdom is deep and
subtle. It sees through the trite surface of things that lesser beings accept.
There’s an episode of the TV cartoon series The
Simpsons when Springfield is
faced with bad news. Homer knows that sinister forces are to blame. Marge
thinks it was an accident. “How naïve”, sighs a condescending - and naive -
Homer.
Like thousands of public figures
Cook, as a former politician, might have written the odd op. ed. or spoken to a
few student seminars. It might flatter his memory for him to be grouped with
the glamorous dead, but to imagine that The System needed him eliminated is
unimaginatively dumb. There is, though, a serious way the conspiracy theorist
blocks understanding: if all deaths of prominent people and all spectacular
events have the same sinister cause, you can’t cry wolf when you need to.
Conspiracy Theories
The surprise is that 9/11 has not
excited conspiracy buffs more than it has. What other event has so many of the
necessary ingredients? The big panics of the past, like the 1938 radio
broadcast of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds,
were stories which audiences thought real. The Twin
Towers reversed that, the usual
response being that an image of planes smashing into New
York skyscrapers must be a movie. When fact is more
spectacular than fiction, and apparently features stereotypical heroes and
villains of the moment, wild rumour is as certain as an explosion of fuel.
The laboriously punning title, “9/11
In Plane Sight”, could charitably be forgiven if it referred to the content of
this DVD, but it doesn’t, and that’s a problem, because the conspiracy busters’
central claim is that they can see something that The System has overlooked.
Lots of things. They admit to the much-witnessed New York
planes, but these weren’t all that important. What the rest of us missed were
the multiple signs that the planes didn’t bring down the Towers, which were in
truth lowered by a planned demolition. And the other two “supposedly hijacked”
aircraft were not in plane sight at all. In the DVD’s alternative reality they
didn’t exist. The Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, while United Airlines
Flight 93, the plane that the unwitting world believes to have come down in the
countryside, also disappeared. The Pennsylvania
field that featured on TV news was really untouched. And according to “Let’s
Roll 9/11” the al Qaeda suicide bombers didn’t exist either.
A stated dislike for Bushite America
should not blind the conspiracist to mundane understandings. He can’t grasp
that even if US
foreign policy might be up to no good that doesn’t mean that Americans are
uniquely villainous individuals. Neither does the bad guy win every time. The
paranoid pessimism of the conspiracist, his insistence that everything is
always worse than it seems, betrays him every time. With no paints in the
palette but midnight black the picture
can’t ever be pretty. That might be the intention, but what results is not just
unremitting, it’s featureless. So when the DVDs frame the big question - WHY? -
they become merely tedious.
The first answer is the one we all
knew to expect: 9/11 was set-up by the US
government to justify aggression. A belief that Bush has used 9/11 to advance
his quest for global hegemony is hard not to hold - and a projection of
American superpower should have been anticipated right from the start - but this
does not make the conspiracists prescient. It’s more like the old saw about how
if you got enough monkeys on enough typewriters they’d eventually write “King
Lear”. More important than mere coincidence is prediction based on analysis,
and here the conspiracists fire blanks. They reel off names - Afghanistan,
Taliban, Iraq
- but they don’t say why Bush wanted these enemies.
Instead they pile up a random usual
suspects enemies list. The evil forces connected to the State include “defence
contractors” and Congress. The implication is that, like any scam artists, the
former are in it for the money; the latter want nothing more than the ability
to “legislate your freedoms away” by subjecting American citizens to bodyscans
and body cavity searches.
In a moment what was purporting to
be an analysis of imperialism morphs into a spoiled child whine. The subject
matter might seem to be Noam Chomsky, but it’s more like the musings of the
fascist bomber Timothy McVeigh*. Indeed the film veers swiftly from 9/11 and
the corrupt government to the more congenial territory
of Oklahoma City. The conspirators
want to establish some sort of link between the (apparently still undisputedly)
home grown bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma and 9/11, but not even
these nutters can do more than throw the names and words into the pot, words
like “explosion” and “bomb”, and mix like mad, hoping they’ll bake something. * Timothy McVeigh was executed for the 1995
bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City,
which killed more than 160 people. Ed.
The narrator of “9/11: In Plane
Sight” looks soberly at the camera and sounds like one of those “trusted” TV
anchormen. “Let’s Roll” has more fun. “I hope you’re sitting down”, the
voice-over warns. It’s got the boring Government stuff out of the way, so we
know we’re going to get the real gen. Under the Twin
Towers was $US160 billion in gold
and/or the owner with the obviously Jewish name wanted the place torched as an
insurance scam. Wait, there’s more: big - and of course not investigated -
insider trading in airline shares. Get it? And, listen up, the purpose of
American foreign policy is “only to make trillions of dollars”.
“‘Angry yet?”, the unseen Timothy
McVeighite voice asks as he prepares the punch line. “Tell total strangers. Ask
questions”. We’re being harangued by the pub bore. We see a clip from a TV chat
show, where some guy, captioned as “conspiracy theorist”, is being interviewed
by US talk show
host, Geraldo Riviera. Foreign audiences need to know that Riviera’s
whole schtick is to be tacky. If Geraldo has you on the show, you’re not
supposed to be taken seriously.
Bush Is A Frontman For Washington
Insiders
Conspiracists are prone to
uncovering “hidden agendas”, so Antonia Juhasz’s title could give the impression
that she’s also off on a ghost busting mission. She isn’t. She is accurate in a
literal sense. For all his incoherent manner and cowpoke persona George Bush is
frontman for powerful Washington
insiders who have written down their aims.
Juhasz traces the “Bush Agenda” to
1992, the final year of his dad’s presidency. That’s when six men, who included
Dick Cheney, now Vice President, and Donald Rumsfeld, now Defense Secretary,
drafted Bush Senior’s Defense Planning Guidance (DPG). Bush Senior was “setting
the agenda” for his successors. Emboldened by the collapse of the Soviet bloc
and his recent (first) Gulf War win, Bush was hoping to create a legacy. DPG
was a blueprint for the projection of an unrivalled American power at one of
those moments when anything seemed possible. DPG’s agenda was to abort the
prospect of a “peace dividend” by making sure that America
kept up its big military spending. The authors argued that the US
should be able to project overwhelming force anywhere any time. The authors
envisioned a system in which “the world order is ultimately backed by the US”.
Although it had no feasible military
rival, America
needed to “establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of
convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or
pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second,
in the non-defence area, we must discourage them from challenging our
leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.
Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors
from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”.
Note how the language slides from
defence, the need for which is assumed. Thus the creation of a “world order” refers
to the purpose of American military and defence policy. It’s to do with what’s
meant to result, the imposing of a “new order”, a planet in which all and
sundry accept that America
is the sole superpower. It’s aimed as much at Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Group of Seven (G7) rivals as at
countries like Russia
or China.
No-one needs to be reminded of America’s
attitude to the mass of the planet that used to be called Second or Third
World. That aspect of the “old order” hasn’t changed. The “new
order” part is that the US
might drop its First World North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and
European Union (EU) mates of the last half century. Bush thinks the US
now has the ability, and perhaps the need, to go it alone. That’s the agenda.
The CIA Spells It Out
The new order, which is usually
called globalisation, is to do with economic supremacy, and it’s quite happy if
it leaves in its wake what others might call disorder. It even expects it. In
2000 the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) noted that the policies which
Bush and his mates were hawking would induce “deepening economic stagnation,
political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political,
ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that
often accompanies it” (“Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About The Future With
Non-Government Experts”, approved for publication by the National Foreign
Intelligence Board, under the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence,
US National Intelligence Council, 2000-02, December 2000, cited by Juhasz, p5).
Four years later the CIA, the brain
that guides Pentagon muscle, confirmed these predictions. “The gap between the
‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ will widen... Globalisation will profoundly shake
up the status quo, generating enormous ... convulsions”. The CIA concludes:
“The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating”
(“Global Trends 2020: Mapping The Global Future”, National Intelligence Council’s
2020 Project, December 2004; cited by Juhasz, p298. The National Intelligence
Council is a Federal agency which provides the Government with intelligence
forecasts).
Between these two assessments, in
January, 2002, four months after the plane attacks - though plans to attack Iraq
were aired in the White House on September
12, 2001 - Bush addressed Congress: “In this moment of opportunity a
common danger is erasing old rivalries... In every region, free markets and
free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives... [T]he
forces of terror cannot stop the momentum of freedom”.
Central to all these “freedoms”,
Juhasz remarks, is the one which is called “free trade”, a phrase which serves
as “shorthand for a number of economic policies that expand the rights of
multinational corporations and investors to operate in more locations, under
fewer regulations”. “Free trade” is the freedom that defines and legitimises
all the other freedoms.
It’s no news that businessmen run Washington
- they always have - but their presence has morphed from being overwhelming to
being absolute. Juhasz notes that “the President, the Vice-President, and the
Secretaries of Defense, Energy, Treasury and Commerce are all former Chief
Executive Officers (CEOs). The Secretaries of State, Labor, Housing and Urban
Development, and Transportation are all former corporate executives or
directors”.
So, in an obvious sense, there
doesn’t need to be a conspiracy. It used to be said that what was good for
General Motors was good for America.
These days GM might be down on its luck, but the sentiment remains: what’s good
for corporate America
is good for America.
The essence of Bushite America is the emergence of a new elite within American
capitalism. Juhasz finds its centre in four corporations: “Chevron,
Halliburton, Lockheed Martin and Bechtel represent three key pillars of the
Bush Agenda: oil, war, and building the infrastructure of corporate
globalisation... Not only have their past and present executives directly
shaped the Bush Agenda, but the companies directly profit from its
implementation today”.
Iraq Is The Obsession
Juhasz shows how Iraq
has come to be a Bushite obsession. Because it has large oil reserves and a
strategic position, Iraq
has long bothered both the American and British governments, so Juhasz reminds us that sometimes the new order
resembles old orders. In the years after World War 1 the then imperial rivals,
the US and the UK,
squabbled over who would get Iraq’s
oil. The West was content that an Iraqi government remained in office so long
as the US-UK axis was in power: “The Iraqis, however, wanted the British out.
In 1932, in a situation remarkably similar to that of present day Iraq
and the United States,
the British granted Iraq
nominal independence while British
troops remained stationed in the country. British officials maintained posts in
all levels of the Iraqi government, and both the British government and British
companies exercised control over key sectors of the Iraqi economy” (author’s
emphasis).
Iraq’s
pattern of veering between dependence and defiance culminated in Saddam
Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait
(itself created as a client state of UK
oil interests). Juhasz notes that “there are two main schools of thought as to
why the United States
did not stop the invasion of Kuwait
before it began. The first is that Bush Senior believed that he and Hussein
were working together, but Hussein had to make a show of aggression to impress
both those inside and outside of Iraq
of his seriousness. Bush did not actually believe that Hussein would invade Kuwait
in defiance of US interests (even if those interests had not been stated) and
those of most of Iraq’s
neighbours, and Hussein did not actually believe that Bush would stop him if he
did invade. But once Hussein invaded Kuwait,
the Bush Administration could not allow him to control both his own and Kuwait’s
oil and threaten Saudi Arabia,
particularly since he had demonstrated that he could no longer be trusted in
serving US interests. Hussein had to be removed. The other school of thought
... is that Bush allowed Hussein to invade Kuwait
because it provided an excuse to remove Hussein from power, and the war with Iraq,
in turn, provided the necessary excuse to bring a significantly increased US
military presence into the region...”.
This assessment is typical of
Juhasz’s restrained and thoughtful tone. She suggests that “a combination of
the two arguments is also possible” and leaves the matter. Juhasz is similarly open-ended
in discussing the debatable answers as to why Bush Senior’s army did not go on
to Baghdad and catch Hussein.
Gwynne Dyer (see below) makes the case that Bush Senior, a product of the
post-WW2 order, was cautious about leaving Iraq
with no rooted government as the country would have become unpredictable and
ungovernable. Bush Senior might not have launched Gulf War 2.
Juhasz is, however, sure that the
current conventional wisdom about Bush Junior’s policy is wrong. “It has been
said so often that it is now repeated as gospel that the Bush administration
had no plan for post-conflict Iraq.
But the gospel is not correct. There was at least one clear plan - an economic
plan - the blueprint for which was ready and in Bush Administration hands at
least two months prior to the invasion”. Of course it was. It was the plan for
“free trade”. And as Napoleon supposedly said, you can’t make an omelette
without breaking eggs.
As expressed in its Iraq
clauses, the Bush agenda is commendably specific, consisting of 100 “Orders”.
These were published in 2003 by a certain L Paul Bremer 3rd. Once
Hussein was overthrown, the US
sent in an “administrator”. The first choice, General Jay Garner, was fired in
no time, scorned as a failure by a sycophantic mass media reciting lines
drafted in Washington. His
“failure” was that he urged two policies that made sense to most outside Washington
but not to those inside it: a quick transfer of power to Iraqis so that the US
would not come to be seen as an occupying force; and a more restrained, less
ideological, economic prescription. A reliable toady, Paul Bremer, had to be
flown in to draft a constitution for Washington’s
new, improved product.
Bremer’s consultants, BearingPoint
Inc. of McLean, Virginia
(home of the Pentagon), picked up $US250 million for writing it up, so it
should be good. BearingPoint was spun off from KPMG, one of the “Big Four”
accountancy transnationals – it used to be KPMG’s management consultancy arm
(BearingPoint is a sponsor of Local Government NZ.).
Blueprint For A Pure Neo-Liberal Economy
Bremer and BearingPoint’s 100
“Orders” are a complete blueprint for running a purist neo-liberal economy. We
heard in May 2006 of US Marines running amok and murdering civilians. They
might have been comforted by Order 17, which grants legal immunity from Iraqi
laws to Coalition forces - and to corporations, corporate subcontractors and
their employees. Order 37 mandates a flat tax system, replacing Iraq’s
progressive tax system. Order 94 opens a previously closed banking system to
allow complete and unrestricted foreign ownership.
The occupation is equally military
and economic. Were Bush’s purpose to be the establishment of “democracy”, as he
has always insisted, he would not be trying to remove the possibility of choice
from a successor Iraqi government. The Orders are the laboratory of the “new
order” and they exist to negate democracy (as the rest of us conceive it).
This did not preclude Bremer and
BearingPoint from resurrecting business as usual when it came to their mates at
Bechtel and Halliburton. They were guaranteed the very “old order” cost-plus
contracts. These allow a company to bill for a fixed percentage over and above
whatever the work costs. The fattest pig at the trough, Halliburton, recent
home of Vice-President Dick Cheney, has contracts worth over $US11 billion (in July 2006, the Pentagon cancelled
Halliburton’s huge logistic support contract and put it up for open bid,
because of Halliburton’s shoddy management, flagrant over-charging and general
corporate arrogance in its dealings with the military. Ed.).
The core of Bremer’s constitution is
Order 39 legislating “national treatment”, a provision that would disallow an
Iraqi government from any measure which might be deemed to protect domestic
contractors from foreign competition. Yet it provides for foreigners to get
preferential treatment. This enacts the complete neo-liberal freedom that, in
the face of global protest, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been unable
to achieve. After this, his work brilliantly done, Bremer went back Stateside.
Those who keep saying that Bush had no plan do not see that Bremer succeeded in
putting in place one of the clearest and most complete plans in all of history.
Juhasz traces the “free trade” phase
of the American agenda to the 1980s’ Reagan-era Structural Adjustment Program
(SAP). Developing countries, trapped in debt to foreign banks, “had to adhere
to a series of strict conditions that would reduce domestic spending while increasing
capital available to pay back loans. The conditions were always the same,
regardless of the country in question. They all followed the same corporate
globalisation model: privatise government industries, eliminate restrictions on
foreign ownership and investment, eliminate barriers to trade, eliminate
government restrictions on foreign corporations, cut government spending,
devalue the nation’s currency, and focus development on exporting key resources
such as oil, minerals, trees, agricultural products, luxury goods such as
coffee and flowers, and the like”.
Meanwhile the US
was tying its neighbours, Canada
and Mexico,
into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA, which was to be
the template for the world, enacting SAP policy at governmental levels. The
inevitable result of a deregulated continent was that only the biggest
corporations, those with the lowest unit costs and most automated procedures,
thrived. Juhasz picks Wal-Mart, the grossest of them all, as the icon of the new
order. Wal-Mart has eliminated livelihoods in the US
by ending competition in manufacturing and retail and by producing its goods in
foreign countries. Throughout North America it has laid
waste local towns. Yes, its products are cheap and nasty, but then, with its
customers increasingly hard up, they need to be. By importing its wares from
the cheapest sources Wal-Mart made its owners, the Walton family,
multi-billionaires. Juhasz describes Mexican border towns as being cheap labour
camps from which Wal-Mart and others export into the American market. Mexican
enterprises cannot compete. As the only viable employer in a regional economy
it has itself created, Wal-Mart can drive down wages all over again. Wal-Mart
is an emblem of globalisation.
In 1997, during the Clinton
presidency between Bushes Senior and Junior, a cabal of neoconservative
intellectuals proclaimed their Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The
first order of business, PNAC urged, was the removal of Saddam Hussein, who
occupied a strategic space on top of lots of oil. A few weeks later an outfit
called the Center for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG) wrote to Clinton
with the same demand. The two groups - and others with the same agenda that
sprouted like toadstools on a dung heap - had interlocking Bush Senior and
Junior Cabinet-and-Chief Executive Officer membership. One such, Richard Perle,
who chaired CPSG, is best known for his 1980s-era promotion of a first-strike
nuclear policy against the former Soviet Union.
Gwynne Dyer (see below) cites an
agenda that would have delighted conspiracists, were they into reading. A
thinktank penned “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, which openly yearned for
“some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor”.
The flood of propaganda broke the dam when Clinton
enacted the Iraq Liberation Act. This stated that “it should be the policy of
the United States
to support efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq
and to promote the emergence of a democratic (i.e. ‘free trade’ neo-liberal)
government to replace that regime”. Does this mean that Bush’s agenda is not
new?
Bush Junior is certainly brazen. Few
would deny that he is different in degree from both his father and Clinton. Is
he also different in kind? He is the first modern president to avowedly go it
alone. It is hard to imagine that Clinton
would have sought opportunities to insult the United Nations, as Bushite
American officials do routinely. And Clinton’s
hacks, while free traders one and all, were not the neo-con zealots who poured
hatred into the ears of Bush Junior. Perhaps the difference between the last
two presidents is the difference between opportunism and fanaticism.
Oil Is The Drug Which The Empire Must Have At Any Cost
Juhasz might not be the first
commentator to suggest that, at the black core of US
policy, is oil, but not always is the connection between oil’s part in
informing foreign and domestic policy as succinctly analysed as it is here. All
US governments have put the need for (what they deem to be) secure supply of
oil as a first principle, and for the last three decades a sort of permanent
oil crisis has preoccupied policy makers.
In 1970, Juhasz argues, domestic US
oil production peaked. From then on the need for foreign supplies became
increasingly urgent. Libya
nationalised its oil in 1971 (making its ruler, Colonel Ghadaffi, part of the
“Axis of Evil”) and Iraq,
a more important source, nationalised in 1972. This was the time of the “oil
crisis”, when the world’s economies seemed permanently stuck in a bog of crude.
Prices soared; so too - though they prattled endlessly of how sorry they were
for the whole unavoidable mess - did Big Oil’s profits. It is not a coincidence
that the decade of the 1970s marked the end of a post-war expansion of the
domestic economy. Thirty years of rising production and prosperity brought a
booming Gross Domestic Product (GDP), strong trade unions, rising wages and
greater equality. In the US
the share of total wealth that the richest cornered for themselves fell by 10%.
In 1980 the Reagan presidency
ushered in a decade in which the trend towards better living standards was more
than reversed. In the 1980s the rich’s share of national wealth went up by 20%,
while the great bulk of the population were mired, and the poorest became
poorer, even in absolute terms. The oil shock had been the catalyst for two
historic shifts, long sought by transnational corporations: a global transfer
of money and influence to the very richest Americans and their mates overseas,
and, within America,
from working families to corporations, the biggest of which were from the same
all-too-familiar rogues’ gallery.
The Bush agenda, largely written by
oil men, is to make explicit the primacy of Big Oil in a historical moment
which has seemed to leave the US
with enhanced global power. Big Oil acts as the keystone for an imperial arch.
The men around Bush were in most cases the men who advised his father. They
have spent their working lives passing between Government and the corporations
that get all the big federal contracts. The power elite, the men - and one
woman, Condoleezza Rice - who literally have written the agenda, have made
themselves known to us. The agenda is anything but secret. Juhasz’s focus is
the international aspect of Bushite arrogance. This does not mean that the
agenda is not also concerned with keeping the locals in check. On the contrary,
both Juhasz and Bush take this motive for granted.
How much more useful is this
explanation, and how much more straightforward, than the conspirators’ vague,
generic rant about “defence contractors”, insurance scams, inside traders and
lost gold. How much more devastating and convincing as evidence is the real
world. The conspiracists are unused to systematic analysis, and because they
cannot see either the trees or the wood, they have to invent. They have picked
up from the popular mass media (the same mass media that they now “denounce”) a
suspicion that the world might have complexities they had not imagined, but
they have no idea as to how it works. Like Homer Simpson, they adopt a
know-nothing cynicism as a shield against their ignorance being revealed.
Journalist Stephen Kinzer’s detailed
history. “Overthrow”, which chronicles American adventures overseas, is an
entertaining account, well written and full of anecdotes from the adventurers
themselves. On a global scale, American mastery of technique and control of
information often looks smooth, at least from a distance of time and space. On the
ground, as they say, the plotters are, as likely as not, bunglers.
Kinzer picks several events as being
significant, an interpretation that follows a historians’ consensus. When the
narrative has to do with US foreign policy, the role of the mass media, the
biases of corporatocracy and their enemies, the conventional wisdom can be
dangerous, a recital of unexamined assumption. It’s not a worry here. Kinzer
has made good choices.
In a section called “Covert Action”,
Kinzer relates four key interventions, chosen because in all of them the
American role was decisive. They shared three other characteristics. In each
case, Kinzer says, the presidents concerned were acting within US
law. In each case (with one obvious exception) “reasonably democratic governments”
were replaced by dictatorships. In all four cases, a hunger to control
resources was a central motivation.
Iran
In 1953, when an uppity Iran
had to be put down, the US
did not need to send in the Marines. The British wanted to secure their oil,
nationalised by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh had been much
admired in some Western circles for his progressive government, so this was too
much. He had to go down. The UK
was scared that an invasion could provoke a Soviet response, so they asked for
US help. With buckets of Yankee dollars, the CIA did the trick. Out went the
Prime Minister and a burgeoning democracy. In came the Shah and his secret
police.
Thieves fall out, especially if one
of a pair has the big bucks and the big guns. Mossadegh had offered British oil
interests a 50/50 split. After the Americans took over their coup, they had to
settle for a 20% take. A US Supreme Court judge who had visited Iran
both before and after the coup was not impressed. “When Mossadegh and Persia
(the old name for Iran.
Ed.) started basic reforms, we became alarmed. We united with the British
to destroy him; we succeeded; and ever since, our name has not been an honoured
one in the Middle East”.
Notoriously, Americans tend to the
Henry Ford view that history is bunk, so that, a generation later, when the
Shah was deposed and the US Embassy in Tehran
was overrun, in 1979, the kidnappers were wont to remind their baffled captives
of the events of 1953. Iranian resentment had since been nurtured by the Shah’s
destruction of democracy and secular humanism. Mosques, which needs be were
left alone, sheltered obscurantist clerics, who filled the vacuum.
Guatemala
It was much the same the next year
(1954) in the Central American country of Guatemala.
A progressive leader was ousted for trying to wrest some control over his
country’s tiny finances from a foreign corporation. President Jacobo Arbenz
nationalised United Fruit, a US
banana monopoly, on the basis of its stated revenues of around $US1 million,
only to find that the company deemed it unreasonable to suppose that United
Fruit would tell the truth about such matters. Its real profits were 20 times
higher, Arbenz was informed. He might have guessed they would be miffed. United
Fruit had acquired its lands by taking them. So out went another promising
democracy and in came another thug to make Guatemala
safe again for banana profits.
President Dwight Eisenhower’s
Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and his brother, Allen, Director of the
CIA, were both shareholders of United Fruit and John was one of their lawyers.
This would not have been a moral impediment to Dulles. A fundamentalist
Christian, John Foster Dulles was untroubled by doubt. Like so many political
careerists he had little experience of life beyond provincial Republicanism.
Dulles, whose tenure in federal office coincided with the grotesqueries of Joe
McCarthy*, saw a monster called Communism lurking in the shadows, encircling
the bright city on the hill that was America.
Arbenz wasn’t keen on an American banana company, which made him a commie,
which meant he had to go. * US
Senator Joe McCarthy, with his inquisitions and deranged accusations, became
synonymous with the anti-Communist witch hunts and hysteria in the 1950s. Ed.
There is a tendency to suppose that
men like Dulles, with access to both Intelligence and “intelligence”, do not
mean what they say. It suits great powers to have bogeymen to blame for the
depredations they are said to force upon the guardians of the cities on the
hill. We’d like you to be free and happy, the guardians say, but not yet. First
we must be on watch against the bogeyman, so you’ll have to forgive us for
upping your taxes so we can buy more tanks. Priests and imams hunt for devils; official
America
nurtures a Communist threat. Indeed it is the very crudity of McCarthyist
scapegoating, and its often farcical hysteria, that gave the whole phenomenon
of conspiracy theory a kick start. If a superstition has the effect of
justifying an elite class through metaphysics and irrational speculation, and
if it comes to be believed by opinion leaders, then it’s probably the creation
of that elite.
Vietnam
Who can be sure if Dulles believed
what he said? Ultimately it might not matter, because he would have said it
anyway. Ten years later, after Vietnamese had forced from their country first a
rapacious Japan,
and then a sadly lingering imperial France,
the world might have cut them slack. It might even have given them a hand. But
as we know only too well, a different American president, Kennedy, from a
different party, the Democrats, looked at Vietnam
and saw again the bogeyman. If Dulles was the epitome of 50s’ conservatism,
Kennedy’s main man, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, was supposed to be
Dulles’ nemesis. He was the essence of 60s’ cool. According to the high priests
in the West’s governments and media, McNamara was a “technocrat”. His
“buttoned-down” mind was said to be an awesome calculating machine, as cold and
clear as a prairie winter dawn (in the excitement of the moment, metaphors got
mixed).
The word from Camelot (as the Kennedy era was dubbed, after the
court of the mythical King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Ed.),
and later from his successors, Presidents Johnson and Nixon, was that
“international Communism” was subverting South
Vietnam, on orders from Russia.
Faced with having to figure out how a lumbering Soviet Union
could invisibly direct affairs from an improbable distance, the propagandists
discovered a new puppeteer, China
(Vietnam’s
traditional enemy).
Kinzer relates a 1963 CIA-sponsored
coup in which the Americans deposed their own man, Ngo Dinh Diem, leader of South
Vietnam. This event, Kinzer argues, marks the
moment the US
passed its point of no return. It had not been easy to find a leader to
credibly claim a legitimacy to rival Vietnam’s
war leader, Ho Chi Minh. Diem didn’t talk of independence or economic progress
and he hadn’t lifted a finger against invading Japanese or French armies, so he
was safe. He wasn’t a nationalist, but, best of all, and in fact his only
qualification that mattered, he had defined himself as an anti-commie. At the
time of need Diem was training in an American Catholic seminary - Christians
comprise about 10% of Vietnam’s population - and he had to be flown back home
to be installed as President. As President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) put it: “Shit,
Diem’s the only boy we’ve got out there”.
Diem was put in charge of South
Vietnam (the
country had been partitioned into two independent States at the conclusion of
the victorious Communist-led war of independence against France,
in the 1950s. An election to decide reunification was promised but never held.
Ed.). In North Vietnam,
Ho governed, and not even LBJ and McNamara claimed he did not have a mandate to
do so. In the ravaged and arbitrary territory that was South
Vietnam an undisguised puppet leader with no
popular backing could have ruled - for perhaps a decade or two - only by
terror. Diem didn’t have it in him, seeming to want to come to some
accommodation with Ho. As this could have lead only to a unitary Vietnam
controlled by Ho, Diem had to go. He and his brother were shot dead by an Army
chief.
Kinzer narrates the nasty details of
direct US
government collusion. As he tells it (and previous accounts agree), the murder
of Diem was not in the script, so squabbles broke out both within and between
South Vietnamese and American plotters. Thus it could have been said - as it is
now being said about events in Iraq
- that the Americans did not have a plan. Coup followed coup; the war
spluttered.
Conspiracy or cock-up? Again it’s
the wrong question. There was an undeniable conspiracy, directed by the US
Ambassador, to end Diem’s government. The means might have been a cock-up, but
as long as US
complicity could not be proven, no-one in Washington
would have cared. Some might have welcomed the mess. A bit of chaos along the
way made it clear that the Vietnamese were now entirely subservient to an
intransigent American goal. In modern administrative parlance it could be said
that the US
were the governance branch and the South Vietnamese were operations.
Chile
Kinzer’s fourth example is the 1973
coup in Chile (also on the fateful day of September 11.
Ed.). When General Augusto Pinochet
led a military revolt against the government of Salvador Allende it was, in one
sense, business as usual, the businesses in this case being the members of a
Chile Ad Hoc Committee, which included ITT, Firestone Tire and Rubber,
Bethlehem Steel, Bank of America, Ralston Purina and Dow Chemical. This was a
step up from bananas, and Chile
was a step up from Guatemala
in that its citizens had an expectation of democracy.
Allende is often remembered as the
first elected Marxist - though he is more accurately seen as a social democrat.
His role possibly would have been analogous to that of New Zealand‘s first
Labour Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, in 1935. Whatever the shade of
pink, from an American point of view he was unacceptable. The immediate crisis
that led to his murder (some say he committed suicide when troops stormed the
Presidential Palace) was Allende’s nationalisation of a mining company on terms
consistent with the best available information about the company’s books. Here
was the exact Guatemala
scenario. But no matter what the trigger, the gun was primed to fire. Allende’s
election had been celebrated by Chile’s
American bank refusing a loan. Other banks were told not to advance credit. The
World Bank suspended a livestock improvement grant.
Eisenhower had Dulles; Kennedy had
McNamara; Richard Nixon had Henry Kissinger, a person often considered either a
genius or an evil genius. Evil would be closer. Kissinger’s exalted reputation
cannot be explained by anything on the public record that he has said or done.
Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, is still around, selling influence,
flattering the powerful, uttering deep platitudes (that always are just what
the powerful want to hear). It is Kissinger’s voice that brought him fame. His
Germanic accent reminds Americans of brilliant professors from television
cartoons.
Kissinger could be relied on to tell
the President to act tough and build more bombs. Normally a place as uncool as Chile
would not warrant his attention. “Nothing important”, opined the good doctor,
“can come from the South”. As he had previously told the Chilean Ambassador, “I
am not interested in, nor do I know anything about, the southern portion of the
world from the Pyrenees on down”. Ambition, opportunism
and an obsession with the arid cliches of the Cold War made Kissinger an ideal
organiser of Pinochet’s coup. Kissinger and the CIA drafted the agenda.
“Allende After The Inauguration” noted that if Chile
were to suffer “continued economic decline”, the country might collapse into
chaos and “the military would have justification for intervening”. CIA boss
Richard Helms was happy to scratch the back of the man who was scratching the
back of the President. Helms cabled Kissinger with the observation that “a
sudden disastrous economic situation would be the most logical pretext for a
military move”. Soon Henry Hekscher, the CIA station chief in Santiago,
joined the dots. “You have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile”.
he cabled. “We provide you with formula for chaos, which is unlikely to be
bloodless”.
Hekcsher was trying to cool his
boss’s ardour, not realising that chaos was the intention. In all four of the
classic US
operations - those in Iran,
Guatemala, Vietnam,
and now Chile -
CIA chiefs in the field advised against violence, and in all four cases they
were ignored. This might to some extent have been an example of institutional
memory and pragmatic local knowledge being brushed aside by the State’s
theologians (when experts differ from the less exalted, who allow themselves to
be guided by intuitive hunch, the experts are almost always wrong). But a
blanket know-nothing contempt for the experts, the gambit of one school of
conspiracists, doesn’t help either. The received expert wisdom isn’t all stupid
all the time.
Permanent Crisis Is The Goal
Far from being a careless by-product
of imperial venture, permanent crisis is its goal. A client in need is a client
indeed. What I call the corporatocracy wants peace and quiet as much as the
credit card company wants borrowers to pay on time. Bush’s planned foray in Iraq
“without a plan” is merely the latest example.
It follows that discussion of these
matters framed as a “cock-up or conspiracy?” dilemma misses the point. In the
medium term, it doesn’t matter what happens in the short term. If Guatemala
allows United Fruit a free rein, the niceties that detain judges or
lower-ranking CIA agents are a threat - or would be if they became known to a
wider public - because the motive of imperial foreign policy is never the
welfare of the dependency. In the middle of his account Kinzer’s wanders into a
perfunctory diversion. “What if?” there had been a different president? What if
such a fact had been taken into account? It’s as though Kinzer feels that he
must appeal to liberal notions of individual agency. His conclusion is nearer
the mark. He presents a formula: whenever ideology and economic interest
coincide the US
will act to secure its needs. You get the feeling that in all four cases the
end result was not in doubt.
The United Fruits of the world can
no longer act with impunity at home because democracy deters profits.
Dictatorship is more efficient. To suppose that the US
could have or should have fostered freedom in Guatemala
or Vietnam is
to reverse all the evidence. To the corporatocracy democracy is a risk that
must be eliminated. Guatemala
and Nicaragua (the site of America’s
imperialist war of the 1980s. Ed.) were not called “banana republics” for
nothing.
So there is a fifth common element.
In each country, once the CIA and the other agents of corporatocracy got stuck
in, moral and material standards of living degenerated. Kinzer places the last
century of US
foreign policy in three periods. What he calls the imperial phase began in 1893
when Hawaii was forced into the
process that ended with statehood. 1898 was a decisive year, as it was then
that the US
took over colonial Cuba
and the Philippines
by waging war against a Spanish empire in terminal decline (the US
business conspiracists operating in Hawaii
called themselves The Committee of Safety. They would have been unaware of
Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, from the 18th Century
French Revolution. When you despise the guidance of history, you can look
pretty stupid.) The US
began the 20th Century by thereby announcing that the Americas
and the Pacific were to be seen as within a US
sphere of influence.
The second period, the tawdry era of
Dulles and Kissinger, lasted until Bush’s foray into Iraq.
Before this present adventure, overt US
force was always qualified. Kinzer provides two examples of direct American
military invasion that pre-dated the collapse of the Soviet Union, but both,
Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, were within the American hemisphere (the
first all-US coup was a 1909 foray into Nicaragua, an event which installed a
century - and counting - of dependencies).
A Century Of Pax
Americana And The Quest For Profit
If an American initiative to seize
the moment and impose a Pax Americana
on the world has been the impetus for the amBush of Iraq,
so too was the first imperial phase the result of the restless search for
profit. America
pushed into the Caribbean and the Pacific, Kinzer
suggests, because by the end of the 19th Century, the major
businesses had saturated the domestic market. They needed new customers and new
resources. So it is not surprising that 2003, the climax of this expansion,
played like 1898.
“The tendency of modern times is
toward consolidation. Small states are of the past, and have no future”. This
sentiment sounds contemporary; it has the flavour of the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In
fact it was the 1913 opinion of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, uttered when most of
today’s small states did not yet exist. That is, Lodge wanted colonies to
forget about independence, an unnecessary status if “the market” was to rule
(appropriately, the history of the Lodge family is reminiscent of that of the
Bushes).
Teddy Roosevelt, the imperial
president, was a more impressive person than Bush, but his role was comparable.
Like Bush he liked to swagger, affecting disdain for the wimps of Europe
and the “futile sentimentalists of the international arbitration type”. Here
Teddy was pure George, yet neither the United Nations nor its forerunner, the League
of Nations, had been dreamed of. Roosevelt
represented the high-water mark of international anarchy, the assumption that
big powers could do what they wanted to the powerless, and he didn’t want any
do-gooders to get ideas that there might be better ways of living together on
our small planet (Roosevelt
is back in fashion in today’s America.
For example, see Time, 3/7/06,
which devoted its Annual Special issue
on The Making of America to “Teddy”.
George Bush likes to let it be known that Roosevelt
biographies are among his favourite reading. Ed.).
In the critical year of 1898 an
influential German newspaper complained that “Americans have never worried too
much about diplomatic questions. Wild as their land is wild.... they go forward
on the road they believe they must travel and do not care at all what Europe
says”. Americans were acquiring the “cowboy” tag - put aside over the last 50
years - that Bush is doing his best to restore.
Gwynne Dyer prefaces his analysis of
US foreign
policy with a remark by an academic. “In all of American public life”, said
Andrew Bacevich, “there is hardly a significant prominent figure who finds
fault with the notion of the United States
remaining the world’s sole military superpower until the end of time”. There’s
the rub. At a casual glance from overseas it seems sometimes that Bush is
unpopular. Domestic critics accuse him of arrogance or ignorance or whatever.
But listen closely and you notice that the criticism has to do with the style
of his Administration. When it comes to the basics, the substance, America’s
role as world cop, Bush represents a consensus.
It is axiomatic to Americans that
theirs is the best of all possible worlds. America
represents democracy and opportunity in a way that no other land does. This is
partly historic, stemming from the 18th Century War of Independence
which enshrined Enlightenment principles. The moralism that others associate
with America
derives in part from its history as the embodiment of progressive values. To be
American was to uphold life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is
indeed a great tradition.
The Doctrine Of American Exceptionalism
Americans came to believe that they
could avoid the various miseries that afflicted Europe,
which had to contend with a messy past. The doctrine of American Exceptionalism
teaches that the US
economy need not suffer the depressions that periodically engulf the rest of
the world. Another doctrine, Manifest Destiny, declares that it is in the very
nature of things that America
is destined to be the best. These assumptions are ingrained in the national
psyche. A century after an American invasion of Canada
had been beaten back, a politician like Lodge could still call for the
annexation of Canada
as a deed that would be doing the Canadians a favour. If that was the prospect
for the people across a river with a common heritage, where did all the other
countries stand?
Secular and liberal Americans might
find their President brash. They might wish he was more fluent, but when Bush
says that the world needs American leadership, they don’t argue. And when Bush
confides that he checks out ideas with God, he might be deluded but he’s not
being hypocritical. Better than many
commentators, Dyer, a Canadian now living in Britain,
has the perspective to understand this history. He’s also has some useful
things to say about terrorism, a phenomenon which Americans find hard to see
clearly. Obviously that’s to some extent a result of the 9/11 trauma, but it’s
partly a function of America’s
blessed history.
Terrorism is the weapon of the weak,
Dyer argues, and it never works against your own people. Terrorism’s only
chance is to trap a stronger opponent into reckless behaviour. Like many other
observers, Dyer thinks that Bush’s actions and words have done wonders for
al-Qaeda, but he suggests that 9/11 was flukishly successful, that Osama bin
Laden is unlikely to pull off another such outrage, and that, even if he were
to manage it, this would not affect subsequent world history. Dyer knows the
Islamic and Arab worlds well. He shows why bin Laden has never been able to
hope for much help from the folks back home.
It has already become trite to note
that the need to act against “terrorism” serves as a justification for
aggression. “Terrorism” is the new “Communism”. At a certain level this is of
course true, but with a proviso. Terrorism, as practised at 9/11, and in Madrid
and London and Bali,
does exist, and its targets have the right to defend themselves. Harassing the
Taliban in Afghanistan,
as State sponsors of terrorism against innocents, was not the same thing as the
later war on Iraq.
“Communism”, however, in neither its theory nor its practice - not that is as
it has been defined by successive US
presidents - has ever existed.
Conspiracy theorists have helped
Bush by building up bin Laden’s prestige. Conspiracists suppose terrorists or
master criminals to be smarter than their victims. In their eyes, The Other,
whatever is foreign to their own experience, is always a genius, fiendishly
clever. The bin Ladens of the world are granted a moral and intellectual
clarity that eludes the rest of us. Conspiracists (and their frequent allies
from both the extreme Right and Left in the West) hear al-Qaeda’s manic rants
and obsessions and suppose them to be both acute and sincere. A good, gossipy
conspiracy with the right cast of characters will always gain widespread
admiration. Witness the “Da Vinci Code” frenzy, which has millions of educated
people believing an impossible series of things about the Catholic Church’s
theology and organisation.
In many ways the conspiracists and
the Bushmen are mirrors of each other. Dyer reminds us that Bush is being
constantly egged on by the End-Timers, fundamentalist Christian zealots who
believe that the world is about to end, with the saved (them) about to
experience the bliss of Rapture and an ascension to Heaven, while the rest of
us burn. So why not let God’s armies take down a few Hell-bound sinners in the
meantime? End-Timers include Cabinet members. Fifty years ago the bigots’
language was more honest. “For us”, Dulles once pointed out, “there are two
sorts of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support
free enterprise, and there are the others”.
By posing the big question, as do
all the authors - Why Iraq? - Dyer offers a rational alternative to the
manipulations of the religious nutcases. Dyer sees as self-evident the thesis
of Juhasz and Kinzer that the dominant fact to take into account is a post-Cold
War American desire to hold hegemony over the world. That was why Washington
looked around for new scapegoats and came up with “rogue States”. Bushite
insincerity is indicated by the fact that all the rogues were countries whose
relations with America
had not worsened for decades. Bush needed to pick a fight with one of them.
The candidates were North
Korea, Syria,
Iraq, Iran
and Libya. The
chosen rogue could not be so small that it was not seen as a credible threat,
nor big enough to be too hard. You don’t need those body bags that TV reporters
like to talk about. Iran
was big enough to be ruled out on this score; North
Korea, possibly nuclear and bordering China,
was too dangerous a target.
Iraq: Illegality And
Impunity
Iraq
was ideal. It was the right middling size; its flat, desert terrain was
manageable for swift troop advances; its army had been weakened by previous
wars and by sanctions; its position is strategic, and its leader had already
been demonised by Bush Senior. Dyer rejects the notion that a sheer need for
oil was a factor, because states will always buy and sell for money. This does
not necessarily mean that the politics and economics to do with oil were not a
key reason for the choice, as Juhasz has made clear. Dyer’s focus is on
military and geopolitical relations. He does not discuss finance or trade.
Most importantly for Bush, the Iraq
War was illegal. Reasons were invented to justify the attack, and, after the
event, a fig leaf was worn so that Europe would not lose
face, but what Bush wanted above all else was the means to sideline the United
Nations (and “old” Europe). Bush wanted to make an
omelette as that meant he’d have to crack eggs. Dyer explains how the Bush
agenda can be fully implemented only if there is no rival source - the United
Nations is the only candidate - of legitimacy for a global police force.
Dyer argues that it was by declaring
war to be illegal that the international bodies of the 20th Century
deterred violence, not wholly of course, but enough to make the warmongers feel
they had to justify themselves. If that impediment goes, if the big can act
with impunity as they did in the days of Teddy Roosevelt, well yes, that could
usher in catastrophe. What Bush needs to understand is that Kinzer could well
have added a sixth common element to his accounts of American folly. Most of
the chickens that Bush and his predecessors disturbed have not yet come home to
roost.
--------------------------